Holiday to Iceland

Board 123

Last week, the 123rd Board of TG was not at 'De Residentie' to provide you with a nice cup of coffee, have a good talk or support you in studying for your exams, because we were on holiday to the beautiful, impressive country Iceland.

After a flight of about three hours, the warm Dutch weather was interchanged for a cold winter wonderland. Iceland is known as volcano island, because there are many volcanoes. Some are still active. We stayed in Reykjavik, which is the capital of the country. The city has a population of around 125000 people, which is almost half of all residents. With a beautiful view on a small lake, we could see the weather changing within minutes from snow, hail or rain to sun or vice versa.

To discover more of the special island, we hired a car in which we drove on the few, large roads through the mountains. We sometimes discovered a single church and a farm, which turned out to be a village according to Icelanders. Everyday we made a plan and took the car to another part of Iceland. The whole week was full of exploring high waterfalls, glaciers, cliffs, caves, craters, volcanic landscapes that look like the moon and powerful rivers. We also spotted cute horses, sails and puffins. Sometimes there was a bus full of tourists next to us and sometimes we were completely alone during hiking in mountains. Then it was so quiet that we felt like we were the only one in the world. And everywhere in the country there are geothermal pools and rivers, which of course is very interesting to us as chemical engineers. So, water that is heated by the volcanic activity in the soil sometimes creates beautiful, naturally-heated hot tubs in which you can relax. On the other hand though, the volcanic activity can also give rise to spectacular geysers in the landscape. To give you an impression of what we have done a few photo's (made with the new TG-camera!) are shown below.

To finish our holiday in the right way, we explored the bars and clubs of Reykjavik the last day, which ended in a great party!